I'm the reason they started prayers in school. I'm also the proof that prayer is not enough.

My brother read in an encyclopedia that our eyebrows are important because they, along with our eyelashes, help to keep dirt out of our eyes. He theorized that if dirt got into our eyes, we could get an infection that could get into our brain and we could die.

Please don’t ask me to explain the mind of a 9-year-old boy.

I was the victim of the crime. He lured me into the forest to, “see the nest of baby birds” he had found, tied me up to a tree and shaved off my eyebrows. He probably would have plucked out my eyelashes but I had good teeth and managed to gnaw one of the ropes off and gave him a black eye.

BTW, I am the one that got in trouble because “a punch could have caused real damage” and my eyebrows would grow back.

Why was it common practice for people to buy entire sets of encyclopaedias for their kids and never even check them out to make sure what kind of information they contained? They could have contained porn, or the complete guide to being a serial killer and they would never have known. They just unpacked the books and proudly put them in alphabetical order in the bookcase and said,”Here kids, go get educated.” How irresponsible is that? My brother used the information contained in our set of encyclopaedias to try and kill me. I just want to know where the parental security measures were then? Passwords? Lockdowns? I wonder how many children died because we spent hours reading those things without any parental supervision? Paedophiles could have left their names and numbers to become our pen pals and how would anyone have known?

My brother entered me as his project for the school’s Science Fair. After shaving my eyebrows, he observed me to see how long it would take for me to die. He kept blowing dirt at me and dragging me outside into the fallowed fields when it was windy. He made a chart and built a coffin that he hoped I would be in for the big finale when the parents would all come to see what their kids had done. He was sure he was going to ace first place. Forgive me that I was not as supportive of his efforts as I could have been. He wanted to prove that we did indeed owe our lives to our eyebrows. Therefore, I needed to die. That night when I was crying myself to sleep because I did not want to die he comforted me that at least it would be a noble death. I would be making a huge contribution to science and he was pretty sure both our names would make all future editions of encyclopaedias for years to come.

I am not sure the dude who appeared in the dream he had where he was told to do the experiment actually said anything about the encyclopaedia fame. I think my brother just assumed that. It is entirely possible the dude was referring to the permanence of police and death records.

The day of the big Science Fair O’Rama finally dawned and of course I was still alive because my brother was an idiot. He cried and carried on that I had ruined his entire project and said he didn’t even want to go to the stupid fair.

“Buck up Bucky.” “Life will be full of disappointments.” I not only told him that, I stitched it on the inside of his underwear. (4-H Clothing project – I won first 4th place for my valiant effort at trying to sew a straight line)

MY Science Project, however, went ahead without fail and was a huge success.

I wanted to prove that “stupid” does not float and that it has density, lots of “dense-ity.” My project involved my brother sitting on a little platform and wearing a shirt that said “stupid.” By pushing a button, the platform gave way and he was released into a big see-through tank of water. I theorized that he would always go straight to the bottom of the tank and only by making movements with his hands and feet would he rise up to the top.

I had wanted to create a comparison that would nail my theory. I was sure that if I used duct tape to restrict his arms and legs so he could not move and it would show that he would just stay at the bottom of the tank. I also wanted to demonstrate how adding rocks in his pocket made him sink lower, but my teacher pointed out that the coffin my brother had built for me, was not big enough for him.

I guess that proves that “stupid” also occupies more space than intelligence.

Ahh childhood memories … they are just so … magical in their nostalgic dreamlike quality aren’t they?

My screen fogged up several times while I was typing this.

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

ariaeappleford

The Voice of my generation!! Well, not THE voice, but definitely A voice. A really, really, loud voice. And I have colourful hand puppets to help those of you who can't keep up with me. I can clap out the words slowly. It will be fun. Trust me.